Filming log: The Beach House, aka: PMB walks into a beach house and asks for a pope's robe

Our time with Peter Mackie Burns (aka PMB) was very different to our work with Zam. Zam was very inspirational and abstract (though I think the fundamentals are on their way soon) whereas PMB was very much about the nitty gritty. I missed out on the first few lessons freezing to death on River City but I was there in time to rehearse and shoot the scenes.

Since I had two crew roles, I'll split this into two parts:

First AD, in which I deal with Mr. Tippy-Tappy

My shot at 1st ADing was complicated by several things: the weather meant we had to decamp and rearrange everything and once we were inside we had to contend with filming in a public area. The main problem this posed was when a guest of the hostel decided to surf the web for twenty minutes, spoiling our sound and necessitating a break.

It wasn't a terribly accurate test of my 1st AD potential since we had four hours to shoot a one page scene and it would have taken an act of God to make us go over.

Unfortunately I was struck ill for my second shoot and couldn't make it in.

Directing, in which I test the water


Directing for theatre is something I've always enjoyed, and a role which I fell into naturally; directing for film is a very different process, and I don't think I wholly grasped that before this exercise.

The main difference was that your blocking has to alter for each size of shot. To look natural and well framed, I had to manipulate the distance between my actors unnaturally; instead of finding the right performance I had to find a group of slightly different but not too different good performances.

In the end my scene cut together nicely and it made sense (after the under-covered Home project of last year that was one of the main things I wanted to rectify).

The area it lacked in was really performance. It's certainly not cringe inducing, but it doesn't feel real, the characters aren't actualised. It's a pity, the performances from the rehearsal are ten times better. It's a combination of the actors being inexperienced and me being inexperienced. I could have done more, as PMB put it directed more but there you go, you do you learn. I'm pleased with this as a training exercise.

Bless em, I can't have been the easiest director for Murray and Sam to contend with - I needed a pope's robe we could stain, and then I requested "a girl in a gold bikini". They delivered though, and Murray even got us cream cakes, it was fantastic.